NEIL LENNON says that the loss of key personnel as Rangers have strengthened makes Celtic’s ninth title in a row all the more impressive.
The Celtic manager lost Kieran Tierney to Arsenal in a big-money move last summer, with Moussa Dembele heading to Lyon the summer before for a similarly substantial transfer fee.
If anything though, Lennon believes that the signings coming into Celtic have improved the side despite the loss of those players, and that they had to as their city rivals started to spend big once more.
“That makes it an even greater achievement,” Lennon said.
“There’s no question that Rangers have improved but what gets overlooked is that we’ve improved. And that’s off the back of Brendan selling Moussa Dembele for £20m and at the start of this season us selling Kieran for £25m. So, whatever money we spent was recouped on the sales of players.
“Financially we are still very robust. When you look at when I came in and the changes we made … the new players coming in like Christopher Jullien who had a huge season. (Jeremie) Frimpong had a huge impact, (Mohamed) Elyounoussi, until his injury, was playing fantastically well, Fraser Forster was incredible.
“So our recruitment worked pretty well for us - allied to the core group of players we had.”
Lennon is as much in the dark as anyone else about when football will resume at home or on the continent, making it difficult to prepare for any prospective Champions League qualifiers.
“We don’t know how the landscape of football is going to look,” he said. “We have not got a crystal ball. It’s really difficult to talk about football when there’s so much else going on in the world.
“But we know we’ve got June 10 as maybe a starting point to get the boys back in to train in groups and we’ll start building from there.
“We don’t really know what’s happening [with Europe] at the moment. I think UEFA have a meeting on the 25th of this month so we may have a bit more clarity on that after that.
“But at least we do now know we’ve got a starting point in terms of training. That’s all it was. So, it would be folly for me to say; ‘we’re preparing for this’. It will just have to be week by week as we go along until we get some sort of ratifying of the dates. Then we can start to plan and look forward to those games.”
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